I saw Pageninetynine a couple of times back in the day. The first time was probably 1998, and I was still in high school. I had some friends in a noisy metallic hardcore band called the Clancy Six, and a bunch of us would go see them whenever they played, which was usually in basements or church halls. This night, they played Johns Hopkins, opening for Enemy Soil and Daybreak, two powerviolence who I think shared members with Pig Destroyer. Those two bands seemed old and scary, but right in between the Clancy Six and those bands, there was Pageninetynine, who all looked like they were about our age. The one thing I remember from their set is that they ended with this big extended feedback squeal and with all the band members freezing in place. One by one, they all collapsed to the floor, as if dead. You could do hilariously dramatic stuff like that at shows back then, and maybe only half of the audience would make fun of you.

This summer, the city of Paris put on a show for the world. The obvious highlight of last month’s Olympic opening ceremony was the ecstatic vision of beloved prog-metal titans Gojira, all perched on scattered castle ledges like gargoyles, duetting with Marie Antoinette’s severed head and with an opera soprano singing from a passing boat. Two weeks later, blog-rock overlords Phoenix headlined the closing ceremony in the center of the Stade De France, doing a 2009 Will Never Die Bonnaroo Superjam with Air and Ezra Koenig and that one song from Drive. Throughout the two ceremonies, other French and French-enough musicians made their presence felt: Aya Nakamura, Juliette Armanet, Céline Dion, the Minions, that guy with the angel wings and the accordion. It was a lovely spectacle, but at least one strain of vital French music was sorely absent.

Torture weren’t supposed to be there. They’re not a festival band. They’re barely a band at all. Torture are the project of one guy, a young Chicago multi-instrumentalist who calls himself K.K., and he just added a couple of touring musicians. They only played their first show a few months ago. Their chug-splat music is almost comically unfriendly. They make statements against warfare on a global scale while encouraging you to beat the motherfuck out of your friends while they beat the motherfuck out of you — a strange tension that shouldn’t work but does. And now, K.K. is up onstage in sunny Los Angeles, making chug-splat music for thousands of people, standing up behind his drums and yelling into his Janet Jackson-ass headset mic: “This is your last fucking chance! I don’t give a fuck! Side to side! Front to back! I don’t give a fuck! Kill someone! Hurt someone!”

I went to see Restraining Order, and then I pissed blood. This is not a figure of speech, and it’s not an exaggeration. I got back from the Restraining Order show on Friday night, went to the bathroom, and was like, “Damn, that’s blood.”

A couple of songs into Drain’s headlining set, the dicks came out. These dicks were balloons — plastic, a few feet long, with little dangling ballsacks. I don’t even know whether they were stage props. Someone in the crowd could’ve just shown up with a few inflatable dicks. But the dicks fit the evening’s vibe perfectly, so I can only assume that the dicks were Drain’s. For the entire evening, the dicks bounced around in the audience, sometimes caroming off the ceiling fans, rarely hitting the floor. These dicks were nothing like the giant hydraulic penis that the Beastie Boys used when they were touring behind Licensed To Ill in 1987, but I have to imagine that they served the same purpose — to signal, in the dumbest and silliest way possible, that it was time to party.

“Shit ain’t always going to be happening like this.” That was Zachary Acosta-Lewis, singer for almighty Richmond heavy-hardcore head-wreckers Division Of Mind, onstage last Thursday at a guerrilla Richmond spot that I will not name. Acosta-Lewis often reiterates some variation of that message while Division Of Mind are playing, and he always means it. His point is something like this: DIY scenes don’t just happen. They take work and commitment. People have to put in serious time, without any hope of financial reward and with the full knowledge that their spots could always get raided and shut down by police. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it — taking the sweaty fistfuls of cash at the door, cleaning up the empty bottles outside afterward, persistently reminding everyone at the show not to do anything that might bother the neighbors. When people don’t do that work, the shows don’t happen. When the shows don’t happen, a vital community simply ceases to exist.

They don’t look like emo bands. They don’t act like emo bands, either. I’ve been through I don’t know how many different waves of emo, and I’ve seen a lot of different ways that emo bands can comport themselves on stage, but none of them were quite like this. There’s a certain pugilistic swagger that only a hardcore band can bring. Through most waves of emo, even when we’re talking about Fall Out Boy or whatever, the musicians often come from hardcore. But they never bring that pugilistic swagger over with them — or if they do, I’ve just never seen it. But when Koyo, One Step Closer, and Anxious came to Richmond, all three bands were ready to throw down, even though their music mostly demanded a different kind of reaction.

My first punk show was in somebody’s house. I think it was somebody’s house, anyway. The Loft was a DIY venue in a vaguely terrifying West Baltimore neighborhood, and my first time there felt like a movie. It was a rowhouse with graffiti all over the walls, virtually no lights anywhere, and a tiny stage that was maybe a foot off the ground. Someone kept that place running for years. I was in ninth grade, and I was there to see a band whose bassist went to my high school. I remember nothing about the music, but I remember everything about my first stagedive. That was an eye-opening night.

An underrated thing about hardcore: You can sometimes identify a venue just by YouTube thumbnail — not even the video itself, but just the still image of a screengrab. I can’t think of any other genre of music where that’s the case. Most genres happen in the same clubs or arenas or festivals. Hardcore bands sometimes play in those spaces, but hardcore itself tends to happen in buildings that have character — DIY spaces that serve as refuges because for-profit entertainment venue’s can’t or won’t support everything that comes along with hardcore. Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church is one of those spaces. So is LA’s 1720 Warehouse. And you can always recognize Tampa’s Bryan Glazer FCC at a glance, even if it hosts only one weekend of hardcore bands per year. If your social-media feed is suddenly full of images of huge crowds acting reckless in a cavernous and unforgivingly lit community center, that means FYA Fest is happening.

Expectations can be a bitch. Unrealistic expectations can be such a bitch. Sometimes, when you’re going to see a band you really like for the first time, unrealistic expectations are the only kind that you can manage. That’s how I was with Portrayal Of Guilt. That band makes a sound so dark and huge and pulverizing that I half-anticipated them coming out onstage spitting blood-geysers into the sky like Triple H with the water bottle. A friend once referred to Portrayal Of Guilt as “the Misfits of screamo,” and that’s what I wanted them to be. But no. They’re just some guys — guys who make huge, dark, pulverizing music, but guys nonetheless. It’s not their fault that they’re not mystical demon-wraiths. It’s my fault for thinking, somewhere in the darkest recesses of my mind, that they might be.

Ian Shelton was hurting. When Militarie Gun rolled through Richmond last month, Shelton’s bark sounded as commanding as ever, but he visibly struggled to summon that bark. After Dazy’s James Goodson finished singing “Pressure Cooker” with Militarie Gun, he let the crowd know that we needed to help Ian get through the set. It made me wonder how often that happens. I’ve talked to professional singers who constantly go to doctors, who take voice lessons, who trade tea concoctions and take care to rest their voice whenever possible. Maybe some hardcore singers work that hard to care for their voices, but I’m guessing that most don’t. I’ve met Ian once or twice, and he doesn’t strike me as a guy who does vocal exercises. He screams more than he sings, and when his voice isn’t acting right, he has to scream that much harder.

I’ll be honest: I have no idea whether it’s even a good idea to talk about Home Front as a hardcore band. They don’t necessarily carry themselves as a hardcore band, and they don’t necessarily define themselves as a hardcore band. (Home Front’s Bandcamp tags include the probably-made-up genre name “bootgaze”; they do not include “hardcore.”) They do move like a hardcore band onstage — or, at least, some of them do. One of them remains parked behind a rack of synths and drum machines, but he rocks out the way people in hardcore bands rock out. In recent months, Home Front have gone out on tour with Fucked Up, Poison Rüin, and Alkaline Trio — not hardcore bands, but not not hardcore bands. So maybe they’re not a natural fit for this column, but they’re not a natural fit for anything. That’s one of the reasons that they’re so cool.

There’s an experience that I’d like to recommend. It seems pretty logistically difficult to replicate this specific thing, and it will take a lot of timing and luck on your part, but if you can make it happen, you should. First, you need to be at an outdoor show that gets evacuated because of lightning. Then, you need to find a bar where you can hang out with friends and get just a smidge of beer-buzz going. If it was disgustingly, inhumanly hot before the thunder, that’ll help. Then, when you get the notification that the show is back on again, head back with your friends. It’ll suddenly be beautiful out, and you’ll feel a whole lot better than you would’ve if you’d just been at an uneventful outdoor gig all day. And when you’re walking back through the cool twilight, make sure the Gaslight Anthem are onstage. That’s the key.

How do you write an 11-minute powerviolence song? How is that possible? As a genre, powerviolence is defined, at least in large part, by its brevity. Bands challenge themselves and each other to come up with short, disorienting bursts of anxiety. A song might be 45 seconds long, and it might switch riffs and tempos three times. The whole point is to keep you on edge, off-kilter. You can’t settle into a groove. The very idea of groove is antithetical to the entire project. But the best powerviolence song that I’ve heard in a long minute is Brain Tourniquet’s “An Expression In Pain,” a berserk marathon that roils and splinters and heaves and spits for 10 minutes and 49 seconds. It moves from guttural grind to soul-shattered noise to demonic march to god knows what else, and it earns every second.

I didn’t see Drain. I don’t want to talk about it. Last week, I flew down to an ungodly-hot Austin to cover Oblivion Access, a very cool festival that’s devoted to fringy and extreme sounds. On the last day of the festival, the year’s most exciting hardcore tour came to Austin as part of that Oblivion Access program. Drain, Drug Church, Magnitude, Gel, Restraining Order, Mugger, and Black Mercy played at the Mohawk — an outdoor daytime show when the temperature was well into the triple degrees. That lineup is practically a festival unto itself. I wasn’t there. Had to be home. Didn’t check the festival schedule before booking my flight. Had to celebrate a kid’s birthday. Just one of those things.

It happens fast. You can watch it happen. Hardcore bands don’t usually start off fully formed. If you see a band early enough in its lifecycle, that band can seem nervous and tentative — partly because of the band members themselves and partly because hardcore audiences usually aren’t willing to fully go off for a band until that band become familiar. But when a band plays out enough, it can transform into an absolute beast so quickly that it can leave your head spinning. Just in the past year or two, we’ve seen that happen again and again — with Gel, Speed, Zulu, Scowl, Pain Of Truth, tons of others. Right now, we’re seeing it happen with Jivebomb.

“That song didn’t seem so fast when I was 16.” Gorilla Biscuits singer Anthony Civarelli, better known to most of the world as Civ, isn’t 16 anymore. Last month in Richmond, Civ had just finished ranting his way through one of the short and delirious bursts of indignation that his band recorded decades earlier — I think it was “Good Intentions” — and he was a little winded. But Civ rallied. He didn’t have a choice. A sold-out crowd had assembled to euphorically rage along with anthems of youthful pride, played by men who are no longer young. A few minutes later, Civ dedicated another classic to all the people who have to drag themselves out of bed in the morning to feed the dogs and the kids — “the fuckin’ kids” — before heading off to work in the morning. I feel you, brother.

You don’t know anything until you’re in the room. You can watch all the Hate5six videos you want, but to truly experience a band that’s anywhere near the hardcore spectrum, you need to be there, breathing the same air, braving the same stagedivers. Sometimes, you can get a pretty good idea of how things will go. Certain bands write music in ways specifically tailored to get certain reactions from the crowd, and if you’ve been to a few shows, then you understand the rituals involved. Even there, though, a hardcore show thrives on a certain level of unpredictable, combustible chaos. And when a band’s whole style is built on chaos, then you can’t go in there with expectations.

The kick did not look like an accident. A few songs into Scowl’s set in Richmond on Friday, during the breakdown of I forget which song, the spirit left the body of the guy standing a few feet away from me. Someone in the pit threw a very hard kick at whoever happened to be standing on the pit’s edge. A kick like that is not an uncommon thing. People love to argue online about the ethics of crowdkilling — the practice of throwing haymakers at the people who are adjacent to the pit but not in it. In reality, though, crowdkilling is just a thing that happens. You might not want a stranger to elbow you in the jaw, but you do want to be at a wild-ass show, and an elbow to the jaw might just be the price of admission. Usually, anyone crowdkilling is just aimlessly flailing around. If you get hit, it might hurt, but it won’t end you. This kick, however, was something else.

Have you ever destroyed a giant old tube TV? Just smashed it into oblivion? It’s the best. I recommend it without reservation. Many years ago, I lived in a gigantic house full of art students, and whenever any of our appliances broke, we’d go up on the roof and take turns hurling them down into the driveway, some 30 feet below. This was probably dangerous, but it was definitely fun. Sometimes, I’d just wrap the chord around my fist and swing the thing at the ground. When all those plastic shards would go flying? That would feel good. Last weekend, while the Chisel were starting their set at an FYA Fest aftershow, that same spirit seized somebody.

Eddie Kingston. The Mad King. The first-ever Chikara Grand Champion. Maybe my favorite professional wrestler in the world? He’s up there, anyway. Eddie Kingston is a born storyteller, and as much as I love watching him beat people up, I love watching him talking about beating people up even more. Kingston talks about being people up with a sincere emotional fervor that might cross over into radical vulnerability. When he talks about beating people up, I believe that beating people up is the absolute most important thing to him. His health, both mental and spiritual, depends on beating people up. He’s at the absolute end of his rope, and the only thing that keeps him going is the drive to beat people up. I find Kingston’s work to be profoundly moving on some level that I can’t readily explain.

It’s one thing to know that it’s happening, and it’s another thing to see it for yourself. Turnstile are rock stars now. I mean, they are rock stars. This band, three albums and a decade into its run, fully commands a gigantic room. They have a light show. They have stage moves. They have many, many thousands of people ready to scream when they hit the stage. Turnstile are still a hardcore band. They come from hardcore music. They play hardcore. They conduct themselves as a hardcore band. But people don’t cheer the beginnings of songs at hardcore shows. That is the domain of big rock shows — a riff rings out and the crowd immediately whoops with recognition. That’s happening at Turnstile shows now.

Here’s a fun exercise: Try to keep up with all the non-hardcore music that’s popular in the hardcore community at any given time. It’s always changing! And it’s always pretty weird! Right now, the list goes something like this: Oasis, Alice In Chains, Griselda, Three 6 Mafia. Sepultura and Slipknot seem to be perennial favorites. Type O Negative continue to get a lot of love. A couple of years ago, people were heavily namechecking the Stone Roses, but it seems like that’s died down. And then there’s old-school death metal. Right now, old-school death metal is king.

Sound And Fury was a real event. If I’d put enough planning and resources into the effort, I could’ve been there. You could’ve been there, too. Maybe you were. If you were, congratulations. By all accounts, you got to be part of something truly special. If you weren’t, and if you pay any attention to hardcore at all, then there’s a good chance you’ve spent the past couple of weeks watching or rewatching the videos, feeling a combination of intense jealousy and dizzy, disbelieving glee. Something like 5,000 people showed up to a park in Los Angeles for two days of hardcore. That’s something that’s possible now, and we know that because it happened. Even if you were not one of those 5,000 people, that’s a great thing.

Outside, it was Twister. On the drive, my phone blew up multiple time with tornado warnings, and I didn’t see any of them until I’d parked because I was too busy driving through something like a tornado. I could see maybe five feet in front of my car. More than once, I had to swerve around trees that had fallen across highway lanes. This was one of those drives where you probably should turn back but you convince yourself that the storm will clear up soon, or that there’s no point in driving back through it when it’s just as easy to keep driving. A lot of other cars pulled over under bridges, with hazard lights on, to wait until the storm passed. I kept driving, and when I got there, I was a nervous wreck. That was fine. If you’re going to a screamo show, maybe nervous wreck is an ideal mindstate.

Here’s a situation that I wish everyone could experience at least once: It’s a sunny day in Richmond, Virginia, and the heat is unrelenting. You’re walking down the street in a heavily gentrified neighborhood full of nice restaurants and apartments that you probably couldn’t afford. You come across a relatively large and clean and well-appointed nightclub — the place where I took my daughter to see Beach Bunny last year, the place where the Mountain Goats will play the next time they’re in town. It’s got real air conditioning and sleek concrete floors and an impressive array of beers on tap, and it’s not usually open this time of day. You walk in, and you’re immediately greeted by the sound of Protocol, a Tallahassee band that seems to exist mostly to play in grimy, mildewy punk-house basements. It’s disorienting to see a band like that on an actual stage, with lights that flash different colors and everything. This club is not Protocol’s natural habitat. For just this one day, though, they’re at home, and so are you.

Do you ever find yourself watching a band and thinking about your own level of coolness vis-à-vis that band? That used to happen to me pretty often when I was a kid — when I had a soft, lumpy, unformed notion of what “cool” was. It doesn’t really happen to me anymore. I’ve been around too much, and I’ve known too many people in bands. I’ve mostly stopped caring about my own coolness, and I’ve realized that most people in bands are big fucking dorks. But one night in Richmond last month, the old feeling came back. Spiritual Cramp were onstage, and I was thinking, “Damn, I should really try to be cool like these guys.”

The first stagediver didn’t make it. Three bands into the night, the crowd hadn’t really started going off yet. This was, after all, a Wednesday-night show in a non-packed club when the bill didn’t have any local bands, and that’s the type of situation where a crowd isn’t necessarily primed to go nuts. When the great Wilkes-Barre melodic hardcore band One Step Closer launched into “The Reach,” the fiery singalong that they use to end every set, things changed very quickly. The band got maybe two seconds into the song — like, a riff and a half — before someone launched himself from the stage and landed, as far as I could tell, on his head. The band stopped playing immediately, and people huddled around this poor unfortunate stagediver, helping him get to his feet. When it was clear that he wasn’t dead, One Step Closer singer Ryan Savitsky reminded us to all take care of each other, and that was it. They never got around to playing the rest of “The Reach.”

Almost 24 years ago, Refused released The Shape Of Punk To Come, a twisty and hyperkinetic hardcore record that did everything in its power to live up to its portentous title. The Swedish band crammed synth-bleeps and drum-‘n’-bass explosions and spoken-word interludes into music that was already frantic, and they polished it all up until it sounded stadium-sized. The effort ripped the band to shreds, and they broke up almost immediately. They came back many years later for some cash-in reunion tours and with an underwhelming comeback album that they recorded partially with a Max Martin understudy. The worst thing about The Shape Of Punk To Come might be the fact that the title proved accurate. Over the next decade, a whole lot of wack-ass shit, as well as at least a little bit of genuinely great shit, came out of all the bands who tried to be Refused. But the album itself still stands as a towering bugout — a hardcore band trying to become everything and actually sort of succeeding.

If I’d heard Age Of Apocalypse’s debut album Grim Wisdom when I was 14, I would’ve been extremely fucking in, but it never would’ve occurred to me that I was hearing a hardcore album. In the ’90s, hardcore was expanding in a million different directions, but I didn’t know hardly anything about that. For the longest time, I thought of hardcore as a subgenre of punk rock, and it took years for me to figure out that hardcore was something else. Like every other genre of music, hardcore is a branch that became its own tree.

Hey, remember shows? Shows were fun. I’m glad I got to go to some of them.

The Olympia, Washington band Gag make a pure, direct form of barf-gargle hardcore punk, and they’ve been doing that for nearly a decade. Last year, though, Gag ended their Still Laughing album with a chilly, rudimentary electro instrumental called “Scorpion Sequence.” This was, to put things lightly, a departure. The 11 tracks before “Scorpio Sequence” are all grimy, ugly little two-minute phlegm-snarls. “Scorpio Sequence” is grimy and ugly in its own ways, but it’s just straight-up dance music. On the album, a track like that plays almost as a sarcastic joke. In person, it comes off different.

It’s pretty funny when rappers try to get crowds to mosh. Moshing at rap shows isn’t new, exactly — Onyx made “Slam” in 1993 — but as a widespread phenomenon, it’s a pretty recent development. Some rappers know how to set that shit off. Some do not. When the $uicideboy$’ Grey Day tour came to Richmond a week and a half ago, some of the acts from the duo’s G59 label would try to get the kids in the crowd to circle-pit, but they’d do it in between songs, when there was no music playing. This did not work well, and it led to some frustration: “Run in a circle, you dumbfucks!” Some people need to learn the hard way that nobody’s going to mosh to stage banter. You need to start the song and then call for the circle pit. Turnstile didn’t have that problem.

We should talk about Madball. Good band. Hard band. Madball have existed, in one form or another, since the late ’80s. As a child, Freddy Cricien, now almost universally known as Freddie Madball, would jump onstage with his half-brother Roger Miret’s band Agnostic Front. Madball started off as basically an Agnostic Front side project, with most of the band backing up 12-year-old Cricien. Eventually, Madball found a relatively stable lineup of their own — bassist Jorge Guerra has been in the band since 1993 — and became a regular touring act. By the time Madball released their debut album, the 1994 ass-beater classic Set It Off, the band’s style had solidified. They played a direct, chest-thumping variant on New York hardcore, with metallic chug-riffs and choppy, rap-adjacent vocal cadences and lyrics about all the different reasons that Madball and their friends might potentially fuck you up.

A few weeks ago, the three hosts of the consistently great hardcore podcast Axe To Grind pondered a rhetorical question: Is Regional Justice Center’s new LP Crime And Punishment the biggest powerviolence album of all time? On its face, the question itself seems wrong. Powerviolence is a genre that actively seeks to repel most audiences, that delights in its own inaccessibility. Even within hardcore itself, powerviolence is a forbidding little sub-world. Asking about the relative bigness of powerviolence records feels perverse, almost like comparing the box-office grosses of snuff films.

Someone in God’s Hate keeps a thumb on the pause button while watching TV. Movie soundbites have been part of the sonic tapestry of hardcore for decades. They’re a tried-and-true tactic; if you want to communicate the idea that an extremely hard song is about to start, you throw in a quick sample of someone saying some hard shit in a movie. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of hardcore bands have started off their demos by doing something like that. Often, those samples come from crime movies, Scorsese ones especially, and a band’s specific choice tends to say a lot about that band. Trapped Under Ice, for instance, always communicated Baltimore pride by going heavy on Hairspray and Cry-Baby.